DUMBING DOWN PUBLIC LIBRARIES

According to this article in the January 2, 2007 Washington Post, several classics have to go in order to make room for books which are more popular:

You can't find "Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings" at the Pohick Regional Library anymore. Or "The Education of Henry Adams" at Sherwood Regional. Want Emily Dickinson's "Final Harvest"? Don't look to the Kingstowne branch. It's not that the books are checked out. They're just gone. No one was reading them, so librarians took them off the shelves and dumped them....

Public libraries have always weeded out old or unpopular books to make way for newer titles. But the region's largest library system is taking turnover to a new level. Like Borders and Barnes & Noble, Fairfax is responding aggressively to market preferences, calculating the system's return on its investment by each foot of space on the library shelves -- and figuring out which products will generate the biggest buzz....

Among the books being culled from particular library branches (inset) are The Works of Aristotle, The Great Philosophers by Karl Jaspers, The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.

So much for the public library as the poor man's university!